During Opening Convocation, students from Dr. Angela Elder’s African American History class conducted interviews for an oral history of the integration of Converse College. These students plan to showcase this history with an exhibit on campus in the lobbies of Phifer Hall. This exhibit will be open to the public.

Linda Williams McCune will discuss Work of Art and her art process. Her “work addresses materiality and the ancestral and psychic connections that bind people to each other over place and time. Her sculpture and more recent drawing series constitute a diverse body of work based on shared issues she has sustained for over three decades,” describes David Houston, Director of The Bo Bartlett Center, for South Writ Large. Work of Art will run in the Milliken Art Gallery from February 7-28.

Singer, composer, and vocal technician, Dr. Lori Celeste Hicks, has distinguished herself in the areas of Black Music and African American Repertoire. Praised for her “warm voice” and “magnetic personality”, Dr. Hicks has been name the youngest composer commissioned by the Negro Spiritual Scholarship Foundation and has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages including appearances at Carnegie Hall.

Beginning with a commitment to service, shared community, and the embodied knowledge both college-age and elderly bodies hold, Growing Old engages the memories and stories of both elderly women and young women to explore the centrality of food in our lives as young and old women, to address food insecurity in the American South and the social isolation of elderly community members, and to embrace the intimate ways in which food is central to the social fabric of southern women’s lives.